All this is in W98: I pasted the output from crypt {mypassword}into the appropriate place in /etc/passwd as shown
{myusername}:{output}:500:544::/home/{myusername}:/bin/bash and now I get prompted for a password when starting Cygwin. Nice. (This is when starting Cygwin with "c:\Cygwin\bin\rxvt -e /bin/login" but I know there are lots of variations in how Cygwin may be started. Most of them are successfully tripped up by this new setting.) It's not really very secure, of course: anybody who knew even a bit about things could hack /etc/passwd from Windows and climb in that way. But it serves a small purpose. However: I hadn't expected that two of the simpler startup modes c:\Cygwin\bin\bash --login and c:\Cygwin\bin\bash --login -i (the latter being exactly what's in c:\Cygwin\cygwin.bat) would both let me straight in, by-passing the password protection. Q1. Is there some way, in W98, that I can protect myself further? By the way, other startup modes I have tried include 1. c:\Cygwin\bin\bash followed by ./login at the bash-2.05a$ prompt 2. c:\Cygwin\bin\rxvt followed by ./login at the $ prompt 3. c:\Cygwin\bin\login 4. c:\Cygwin\bin\rxvt -e /bin/login 5. c:\Cygwin\bin\rxvt -e /bin/bash --login It is not easy to distinguish quite what's optimal/ redundant/ inefficient here. I use (4) and have seen (5) recommended. (3) is beautifully sparse. Several other possibilities, not all that different from these, are clearly "wrong" in that they cause what looks like a working terminal window to be flashed briefly to the screen before instantly disappearing. I'm sure there are many other alternatives that work. Summarising: I had been going to ask Q2. what the "approved" startup sequence would be for somebody requiring password protection and wanting also to start in a rxvt terminal. Is it (4)? Q3. Could the contents of c:\Cygwin\cygwin.bat be "officially" tweaked to c:\Cygwin\bin\login in order to gain the password-protection that is not conferred by the current contents of c:\Cygwin\cygwin.bat, or would this change simply induce other, different, equally bad consequences?! Fergus Fergus Fergus -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/